Top 250 Jonathan Haidt Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded.”

— Jonathan Haidt

152. “When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.”

— Jonathan Haidt

153. “The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves; we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.”

— Jonathan Haidt

154. “I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.”

— Jonathan Haidt

155. “By temperament and disposition and emotions, I’m a liberal; but in my beliefs about what’s best for the country, I’m a centrist.”

— Jonathan Haidt

156. “And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.”

— Jonathan Haidt

157. “Most of our social nature is like that of other primates – we’re mostly out for ourselves.”

— Jonathan Haidt

158. “Morality binds and blinds.”

— Jonathan Haidt

159. “Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.”

— Jonathan Haidt

160. “If you want your kids to learn about the physical world, let them play with cups and water; don’t lecture them about the conservation of volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments.”

— Jonathan Haidt

161. “If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated – everyone except for psychopaths.”

— Jonathan Haidt

162. “Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace.”

— Jonathan Haidt

163. “Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.”

— Jonathan Haidt

164. “Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been.”

— Jonathan Haidt

165. “No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself. – SENECA.”

— Jonathan Haidt

166. “Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.”

— Jonathan Haidt

167. “Our politics is groupish, not selfish.”

— Jonathan Haidt

168. “People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of country we should have.”

— Jonathan Haidt

169. “Safetyism” refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”

— Jonathan Haidt

170. “People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.”

— Jonathan Haidt

171. “If you ask people to sing a song together, or to march in step, or just to tap out some beats together on a table, it makes them trust each other more and be more willing to help each other out, in part because it makes people feel more similar to each other.”

— Jonathan Haidt

172. “If you have a personality predisposed to liberalism, you might gravitate more to the artsy crowd or the anti-establishment crowd. And then those peers will affect you, and they will give you values, and you will copy them.”

— Jonathan Haidt

173. “It’s a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.”

— Jonathan Haidt

174. “We lie, cheat, and cut ethical corners quite often when we think we can get away with it, and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others.”

— Jonathan Haidt

175. “Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society.”46.”

— Jonathan Haidt

176. “Anytime we’re interacting with someone, we’re judging them, we’re sharing expectations, we think they didn’t live up to those expectations.”

— Jonathan Haidt

177. “Evolution is a design process; it’s just not an intelligent design process.”

— Jonathan Haidt

178. “If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you’re bound to misunderstand it.”

— Jonathan Haidt

179. “We humans have an extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves, to circle around those things with other people, and in the process to bind ourselves into teams that can pursue larger projects. That’s what religion is all about.”

— Jonathan Haidt

180. “Virtues become vices when they are carried to an extreme.”

— Jonathan Haidt

181. “Putting this all together, it makes sense that WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That’s the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.”

— Jonathan Haidt

182. “We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.”

— Jonathan Haidt

183. “This is an essential part of our story. Americans now bear such animosity toward one another that it’s almost as if many are holding up signs saying, “Please tell me something horrible about the other side, I’ll believe anything!” Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability.”

— Jonathan Haidt

184. “The bottom line is that human minds, like animal minds, are constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, and basing their responses on those reactions. Within the first second of seeing, hearing, or meeting another person, the elephant has already begun to lean toward or away, and that lean influences what you think and do next. Intuitions come first.”

— Jonathan Haidt

185. “We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.36.”

— Jonathan Haidt

186. “Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust. Like maypoles and beehives, they are created by the members of the group, and they then organize the activity of the group. Group-level adaptations, as Williams noted, imply a selection process operating at the group level.”

— Jonathan Haidt

187. “But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.”

— Jonathan Haidt

188. “Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules. To get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations.”

— Jonathan Haidt

189. “Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse.”

— Jonathan Haidt

190. “You don’t need a social scientist to tell you that people behave less ethically when they think nobody can see them.”

— Jonathan Haidt

191. “Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate.”

— Jonathan Haidt

192. “Scientists became “moral exhibitionists” in the lecture hall as they demonized fellow scientists and urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality.14.”

— Jonathan Haidt

193. “The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness.”

— Jonathan Haidt

194. “Some constraint is good for us; absolute freedom is not.”

— Jonathan Haidt

195. “After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives.”

— Jonathan Haidt

196. “Liberals are so committed to a narrative of oppression and exploitation that they can’t take good news, they can’t accept good news.”

— Jonathan Haidt

197. “There is now a great deal of evidence that religions do in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival.”

— Jonathan Haidt

198. “Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.”

— Jonathan Haidt

199. “You can’t have much of a mission without good allies and a good enemy.”

— Jonathan Haidt

200. “Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language – a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.”

— Jonathan Haidt